Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence system, dubbed AlphaGo, won the board game Go on Wednesday, beating South Korea's Lee Se-dol, one of the world’s top players.
Bloomberg Business reported that the AlphaGo software was developed by Google’s London-based AI subsidiary DeepMind, whose co-founder Demis Hassabis described its main advantages: “It’ll never get tired and it’ll never get intimidated."
Wednesday's win — its first in a five-match tournament — is a breakthrough for artificial intelligence, which experts thought was still five to 10 years away from being advanced enough to play Go.
Hassabis posted about the match on Twitter.
Wired described the historic match as “extraordinarily close” and noted that AlphaGo “showed off its remarkable ability to learn the game on its own.”
Lee, who is competing for a $1 million prize from Google, resigned after about three and a half hours. Previously, AlphaGo beat European Go champion Fan Hui in October.
"I was very surprised," Lee said,
according to The Verge. "I didn't expect to lose. [But] I didn't think AlphaGo would play the game in such a perfect manner."
In a column published by CNN, Hassabis and Google CEO Sundar Pichai described the ancient Chinese board game as “deceptively simple” but “dizzyingly complex, with more possible board positions than there are atoms in the universe" — an enticing challenge for AI developers. The game is much more complicated than chess, which IBM computer Deep Blue won against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
The match was streamed live on YouTube, and tens of thousands of people watched,
The New York Times reported.
Pichai shared his congratulations on Twitter.
Twitter users were fascinated by the story.
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